The debate on the marketization of discourse in higher education has sparked and sustained interest among researchers in discourse and education studies across a diversity of contexts.While most research in this line ...The debate on the marketization of discourse in higher education has sparked and sustained interest among researchers in discourse and education studies across a diversity of contexts.While most research in this line has focused on marketized discourses such as advertisements,little attention has been paid to promotional discourse in public institutions such as the About us texts on Chinese university websites.The goal of the present study is twofold:first,to describe the generic features of the university About us texts in China;and second,to analyze how promotional discourse is interdiscursively incorporated in the discourse by referring to the broader sociopolitical context.Findings have indicated five main moves:giving an overview,stressing historical status,displaying strengths,pledging political and ideological allegiance,and communicating goals and visions.Move 3,displaying strengths,has the greatest amount of information and can be further divided into six sub-moves which presents information on campus facilities,faculty team,talent cultivation,disciplinary fields construction,academic research,and international exchange.The main linguistic and rhetorical strategies used in these moves are analyzed and discussed.展开更多
基金This study is supported by the Chinese Ministry of Education(MOE)Humanities and Social Science Research Funding(20YJA740050)the MOE Key Research Project of Humanities and Social Science(16JJD740006)conducted by the Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics(CLAL),Guangdong University of Foreign Studies(GDUFS).We would like to thank the reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript.
文摘The debate on the marketization of discourse in higher education has sparked and sustained interest among researchers in discourse and education studies across a diversity of contexts.While most research in this line has focused on marketized discourses such as advertisements,little attention has been paid to promotional discourse in public institutions such as the About us texts on Chinese university websites.The goal of the present study is twofold:first,to describe the generic features of the university About us texts in China;and second,to analyze how promotional discourse is interdiscursively incorporated in the discourse by referring to the broader sociopolitical context.Findings have indicated five main moves:giving an overview,stressing historical status,displaying strengths,pledging political and ideological allegiance,and communicating goals and visions.Move 3,displaying strengths,has the greatest amount of information and can be further divided into six sub-moves which presents information on campus facilities,faculty team,talent cultivation,disciplinary fields construction,academic research,and international exchange.The main linguistic and rhetorical strategies used in these moves are analyzed and discussed.
